Perception Naturalised: Relocation and the Sensible Qualities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reinterpreting Sellars in the Light of Brandom, McDowell, and A. D. Smith
European Journal of Philosophy, 2009
(pre-publication version) The aim of this paper is to react against some influential interpretations of Sellars. Brandom and McDowell have long claimed to preserve central insights of Sellars’s theory of perception. However, they disagree over what exactly these insights consist in. A. D. Smith has given what he claims is a devastating critique of Sellars in chapter 2 of his book 'The Problem of Perception'. I try to show firstly that Brandom’s and McDowell’s interpretations are unsatisfying when one takes Sellars’ late writings into consideration. Secondly, that we can give another interpretation of Sellars which isn't vulnerable to the problems that Smith thinks Sellars has.
O'Shea, J (2016), ed. _Sellars and His Legacy_ (Oxford University Press).
Sellars and His Legacy, 2016
ABSTRACT: This collection of new essays on the systematic thought and intellectual legacy of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) comes at a time when Sellars’s influence on contemporary debates about mind, meaning, knowledge, and metaphysics has never been greater. Sellars was among the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and many of his central ideas have become philosophical stock-in-trade: for example, his conceptions of the ‘myth of the given’, the ‘logical space of reasons’, and the ‘clash’ between the ‘manifest and scientific images of man-in-the-world’. This volume of well-known contemporary philosophers who have been strongly influenced by Sellars – Robert Brandom, Willem deVries, Robert Kraut, Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, John McDowell, Ruth Millikan, James O’Shea, David Rosenthal, Johanna Seibt, and Michael Williams – critically examines the groundbreaking ideas by means of which Sellars sought to integrate our thought, perception, and rational agency within a naturalistic outlook on reality. Topics include Sellars’s inferentialist semantics and normative functionalist view of the mind; his attempted reconciliations of internalist and externalist aspects of thought, meaning, and knowledge; his novel nominalist account of abstract entities; and a speculative ‘pure process’ metaphysics of consciousness. Of particular interest is how this volume exhibits the ongoing fruitful dialogue between so-called ‘left-wing Sellarsians’, who stress Sellars’s various Kantian and pragmatist defenses of the irreducibility of normativity and rationality within the space of reasons, and ‘right-wing Sellarsians’ who defend the plausibility of Sellars’s highly ambitious and systematic scientific naturalism. Keywords: Sellars, manifest image, scientific realism, naturalism, normativity, pragmatism, meaning, the given, nominalism, rationality, knowledge, perception.
Perception, Imagination, and Demonstrative Reference: A Sellarsian Account
In an important late paper, ‘The Role of the Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Experience’, Sellars brings together ideas about the complex nature of perceptual consciousness and the content of perceptual demonstratives. In a development of his previous ideas about perception, he clarifies the key role played by the imagination in integrating the conceptual and sensory (or phenomenal) components of perceptual experience. I propose a modification of Sellars’s views on the imagination, and show how the resulting conception explains the different ways in which experiences can be conceptualised. I then discuss how the account enables us to understand exactly how, according to the Sellarsian critical realist analysis of experience, we are able to make demonstrative judgements about physical objects, while avoiding a problematic appeal to neo-Russellian notions of acquaintance. Key words: perceptual experience; causal theory of perception; critical realism; Wilfrid Sellars; demonstrative reference; acquaintance; imagination; Kant
The evidence of the senses: A Predictive Processing-based take on the Sellarsian dilemma
Traditional foundationalist empiricist projects in epistemology postulated that sensory states of the subject are epistemically basic, in that they are capable of conferring justification on mental representations of the world without themselves needing to be (inferentially) justified by any antecedent representational states. This sort of view faces a seemingly hopeless dilemma, whose recognition is usually attributed to Wilfrid Sellars. If we treat sensory states as brute stimu-lations devoid of intentional content, then it is hard to see how the senses could provide subjects with anything that could possibly feature in justification-conferring relations with representational states. If we treat them as contentful, then in order to justify contentful states, sensory states themselves would presumably need to be justified by other representational states; but if this is so, they are not able to play a properly foundational epistemic role. In the article, I use the Predictive Processing (PP) view of perception in order to sketch a possible resolution of the Sellarsian dilemma. I draw on PP in order to show how sensory states could actually serve a normative role that is recognizably similar to the one envisioned by traditional empiricists. To do this, I first distinguish representational from non-representational posits of PP and subsequently focus on the role that PP ascribes to sensory or " driving " signal. In particular , I argue that (1) the driving signal plays a role of a non-representational, contentless detector; at the same time, (2) it serves as an " impartial " or " theory neutral " tribunal against which contentful internal models are actively tested and updated. Drawing on Anil Gupta's work, I discuss the epistemic involvement of the sensory signal in perceptual inference and show how the signal provides conditional justification (i.e. justification that is conditional on the justification or rationality of prior knowledge) to perceptual hypotheses. Then I discuss the role the sensory signal plays in perceptual learning. I employ the notion of " epistemic convergence " to sketch out how the sensory signal could provide perceivers with unconditional justification (i.e. one that is not relativized to the justification of prior knowledge). If this approach is right, the Sellarsian dilemma seems to be averted. We can see how the senses can be at the same time silent (i.e. content-less) and capable of playing a sort of foundational epistemic role.
This paper attempts to find a place for the "encounter" in aesthetics that does not require us to treat it as epistemically foundational, thus susceptible to Wilfred Sellars' critique of the Given. It is argued that this is possible if the encounter is a form of what I refer to as "dark phenomenology". Encounters can be conceived as affective episodes in which reality forces us to think without offering any direct yardstick for its description.
In recent decades an increasing number of philosophers influenced by Wilfrid Sellars have stressed the importance of a distinction between the normatively structured ‘logical space of reasons’ on the one hand, and the proper domain of naturalistic causal explanations characteristic of modern natural science on the other. What I explore in this paper is the difficult question of the nature of the relationship between the natural and the normative as it was conceived by Sellars himself. I shall argue that Sellars’ own view represented an attempt to defend both the irreducibility of the normative space of reasons and yet, simultaneously and in another sense, its comprehensive reducibility from the perspective of an ideal scientific conception of the nature of reality and of the human being.
O'Shea J (2007) _Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn_ (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press).
This pdf includes the Introduction, Chapter One, and Conclusion (Ch. 7), plus Notes and Sellars Bibliography. -CONTENTS of the volume: Introduction 1 1 The Philosophical Quest and the Clash of the Images 10 The quest for a stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and scientifi c images 10 The clash of the images and the status of the sensible qualities 14 Sensing, thinking, and willing: persons as complex physical systems? 17 2 Scientifi c Realism and the Scientifi c Image 23 Empiricist approaches to the interpretation of scientifi c theories 24 Sellars’ critique of empiricism and his defense of scientifi c realism 32 The ontological primacy of the scientifi c image 41 3 Meaning and Abstract Entities 48 Approaching thought through language: is meaning a relation? 49 Sellars’ alternative functional role conception of meaning 55 The problem of abstract entities: introducing Sellars’ nominalism 63 Abstract entities: problems and prospects for the metalinguistic account 69 4 Thought, Language, and the Myth of Genius Jones 77 Meaning and pattern-governed linguistic behavior 77 Bedrock uniformity and rule-following normativity in the space of meanings 83 Our Rylean ancestors and genius Jones’s theory of inner thoughts 86 Privileged access and other issues in Sellars’ account of thinking 97 5 Knowledge, Immediate Experience, and the Myth of the Given 106 The idea of the given and the case of sense-datum theories 107 Toward Sellars’ account of perception and appearance 118 Epistemic principles and the holistic structure of our knowledge 125 Genius Jones, Act Two: the intrinsic character of our sensory experiences 136 6 Truth, Picturing, and Ultimate Ontology 143 Truth as semantic assertibility and truth as correspondence 144 Picturing, linguistic representation, and reference 147 Truth, conceptual change, and the ideal scientifi c image 158 The ontology of sensory consciousness and absolute processes 163 7 A Synoptic Vision: Sellars’ Naturalism with a Normative Turn 176 The structure of Sellars’ normative ‘Copernican revolution’ 176 Intentions, volitions, and the moral point of view 178 Persons in the synoptic vision 185 Notes 191 Bibliography 228 Index 243